[Haskell-cafe] handling multiple versions of a data structure

[Antoine Latter]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't tested this idea, but it occurred to me that this might be a good
> place for data families:
> data Z = Z
> newtype S n = S n
> -- Some nastiness to avoid having to see into the future?
> type family Pred n :: *
> type instance Pred (S n) = n
> type instance Pred Z = Z
> class MyDataClass ver where
>   data MyData ver :: *
>   upgrade :: MyData (Pred ver) -> MyData ver
>   -- other methods that won't change from version to version
> class Less a b
> instance Less Z a
> instance Less a b => Less a (S b)
> convert :: Less a b => MyData a -> MyData b
> -- you may need a method in Less to witness the less-ness, but then you'd
> iterate your upgrade until you reach the version you want.
> -- Then you might want to abstract over this class with an existential, so
> it doesn't infect other things:
> data MyDataGeneral = forall ver. MyDataClass ver => MyDataGeneral ver
> -- now make instances for versions you have, with data instances for your
> current version of the structure.
>
> This might not even compile as I just wrote it into my email client, but it
> seems like it could work. Any comments?
> Dan

The Happstack project includes versioning in its serialization libraries -

Here is the API reference:

http://happstack.com/docs/0.5.0/happstack-data/Happstack-Data-Serialize.html

Although I don't know if there are any good tutorials on using it
separated from the Happstack persistence layer.

Antoine

> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Dmitry V'yal <akamaus at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> while developing my neural net simulator I stumbled upon a problem.
>>
>> I have a data type NeuralNet and use Show and Read instances for saving
>> and loading configurations. As time passed, I changed the data type, so the
>> program can no longer load files saved in previous versions.
>>
>> I want fix it. My current idea looks as follows. I'm going to create a
>> bunch of types NN1, NN2, NN3..NNn for different versions and write
>> converters c12 :: N1 -> N2, c23 :: N2 -> N3 and so on.
>>
>> But how to organize the whole process of parsing String into NNn so it's
>> easy to change formats?
>> Something based on using a list of parsers
>> [read, c43 . read, c43 . c23 . read, c43, c23 . c12 . read, c43 . c32 .
>> c21 . read]
>>
>> looks rather verbose and grows quadratically with N.
>>
>> I'm sure there must be a more elegant way. Any ideas?
>>
>> Dmitry
>>
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>
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